The Baseball Box Prophecy by Bruce Newbold - NOT RECOMMENDED

Newbold, Bruce.  The Baseball Box Prophecy, 550 pages.  Hearthsong Entertainment, LLC, 2009.  $14.95 (paperback).  Language: G; Sexual Content: G; Violence: PG.  Cletis is a twelve year-old boy in 1991, which is when the book is set.  In order to join a baseball team, Cletis must be initiated, and that means bothering in the middle of the night an ugly old woman that they all call a witch.  She's not what they say she is, a horrible lady who wants to kill them all.  But she does open Cletis's world and tells him of a prophecy that apparently he is at the center of.  This book was written for me...and yet I hated it.  Every night when I closed the book I sighed and wondered if I would have the tenacity to continue.  Yet I say the book is written for me because I was that boy in the book (minus the prophecy and the really ugly woman).  I rode my bike around, playing baseball all summer.  I had my Beckett Price Guide and would always check to see what my baseball cards were worth.  Sometimes, as I read the book, I smiled because of the nostalgia that came over me.  But usually I was bored out of mind.  I think that this book could have been good if about 500 pages were cut out.  Really, it should have been a short story written for 30 something men who wouldn't mind spending an hour reliving those summers from the past.  But I can't imagine a student today caring enough about Cletis or the prophecy or the references to adolescence in the nineties.  This was a horrible book that did not get better.  Just go watch The Sandlot.  NOT RECOMMENDED.  Brent Smith, Reading Teacher